Comment by thewebguyd
17 hours ago
A stark difference with that analogy is that with a bicycle, the human is still doing quite a bit of work themselves. The bicycle amplifies the human effort, whereas with a motor vehicle, the vehicle replaces the human effort entirely.
No strong opinion on if that's good or bad long term, as humans have been outsourcing portions of their thinking for a really long time, but it's interesting to think about.
The other difference, arguably more important in practice, is that the computer was quickly turned from "bicycle of the mind" into a "TV of the mind". Rarely helps you get where you want, mostly just annoys or entertains you, while feeding you an endless stream of commercials and propaganda - and the one thing it does not give you, is control. There are prescribed paths to choose from, but you're not supposed to make your own - only sit down and stay along for the ride.
LLMs, at least for now, escape the near-total enshittification of computing. They're fully general-purpose, resist attempts at constraining them[0], and are good enough at acting like a human, they're able to defeat user-hostile UX and force interoperability on computer systems despite all attempts of the system owners at preventing it.
The last 2-3 years were a period where end-users (not just hardcore hackers) became profoundly empowered by technology. It won't last forever, but I hope we can get at least few more years of this, before business interests inevitably reassert their power over people once again.
--
[0] - Prompt injection "problem" was, especially early on, a feature from the perspective of end-users. See increasingly creative "jailbreak" prompts invented to escape ham-fisted attempts by vendors to censor models and prevent "inappropriate" conversations.